What are damages for infringement?

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Infringement damages refer to awards and judgments made by a court in an infringement litigation. Infringement litigation arises when a copyright, patent, or trademark is infringed. In other words, a person or company can sue for infringement when someone misuses their intellectual property; if the plaintiff wins the case, he will be awarded damages.

In the United States, many types of intellectual property or ideas are protected from misuse. Patents grant an inventor or creator of a functional product the exclusive right to make and distribute that product for a specified period of time; this is common in software and drug therapies. Copyright grants the author of a non-functional creative work, such as a painting or book or song, the exclusive right to profit from and distribute the original copyright work. Finally, trademarks give the owner the right to use only an identifying sign or image.

When a party misuses any of these types of intellectual property, such as copying software, stealing parts of a book and passing them off as their own, or creating a counterfeit wallet using a company logo, they can be sued for infringement. The person claiming damages must prove that he is the rightful owner of the protected intellectual property. It must also prove that the defendant misused the property. If he does, he may be awarded damages for infringement.

Damages for infringement can be quite difficult to calculate. The main loss is that the copyright, patent or trademark owner has lost his exclusive right and therefore any potential profit he would have had, had it not been for infringement. The problem, however, is that the courts don’t allow speculative profits. In other words, a court will not award the pecuniary damages that the landlord could have done had the infraction not occurred.

Instead, the most common type of damages from infringement litigation involves the deprivation of the defendant of improperly obtained earnings. In other words, if someone stole an idea from a book or created a fake bag, all the money he made from that item should rightfully go to the owner of the intellectual property. Therefore, the appropriate award is monetary compensation for the amount that the defendant made from the unlawful use or sale of the material. If the defendant earned $100,000 United States Dollars (USD), the plaintiff should receive $100,000 USD.

An injunction is another common type of damages resulting from infringement. This occurs when the civil court orders the violator of the intellectual property law to stop. The person must do so or face the contempt of the court.

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